Jari Tervo tackles Kekkonen era in new novel
By Maija Alftan
August 31, 1986 was a rainy day. Water beat against the window of a flat in the Helsinki suburb of Malminkartano. The radio was playing serious music, because former President Urho Kekkonen had just died.
Jari Tervo thought that someone should write a novel about that man someday. He expected someone to beat him to it, as the topic was such an obvious one. Tervo himself was a busy journalist working for the tabloid daily Ilta-Sanomat, who had also had a couple of collections of poetry published.
Over the years Tervo wrote a number of novels about the Rovaniemi underworld. When no Kekkonen novel came, he decided to write it himself. Myyrä ("Mole") is a book of nearly 550 pages about power, espionage, Kekkonen, Finland, and the Soviet Union. It is a surrealistic thriller - an absurd novel of recent history.
"I had written everything that I had to say about the feeling that northern people have for life. My calling and my mission from now on is to write about great national topics", says Tervo, not hesitating to use the word "calling".
Tervo says that he wanted to see if it is possible to write about real issues, instead of topics such as stepfamilies, or work exhaustion. "Stepfamilies, work exhaustion, and Game Boys were made possible by the decisions that were made in 1918, 1939, and 1944, and later."
Tervo, 45, has always had a passion for political history. He has spent plenty of time at the Helsinki University Library, reading old newspapers, and recalling events that he had experienced.
"I picked the fruit from historical research, stealing everything that could be stolen about Kekkonen’s life, giving it a new content in the novel."
Stirred into the mixture are stories that have an element of truth. Kekkonen’s speeches had actually been delivered, and the foreign visits had taken place.
Tervo says that the basic idea of his book is what life was like in the Republic of Finland after the Second World War. It is generally said that Finland lost the war, but actually it was won, because there was a defensive victory. After the war Finland was able to keep its independence thanks to the craftiness and statesmanship skills of its heroic leaders. Blah blah blah...
Tervo says that there is another possible way of thinking. As he sees it, Finland lived at the gates of the biggest and most powerful concentration camp of all time, looked to the West, and lamented at how little freedom of expression exists in the United States.
"We serviced and fed, and probably manufactured clothes for the prison camp. Finland sold machines, food, and clothing to the Soviet Union so that it would not be apparent that we were selling our independence, which is what we were doing."
Tervo is quite serious, as is his character, Jura Karhu, a Security Police detective who is writing his doctoral thesis:
"When viewed between the mendacious lines that I write, my country began to be like the baker at Treblinka, whose nose was penetrated by the smell of pungent camp wounds from behind the eastern border, but the baker turned his back, aired the rooms, and signed another trade protocol."
Tervo writes that the President had remained silent for nearly 40 years about the most important moral question of the time: how many million people may one kill on the pretext of seeking heaven on earth?
"The silence of the President is seen by political scientists as wisdom, even though it was not much different from the life of the baker of Treblinka."
Tervo emphasises that he is an author. For that reason, he does not have to have an alternative model for what should have been done, or when to say "No" to the Russians.
In any case, in a Soviet Finland, Tervo would have been a writer for the Finnish version of the Soviet humour magazine Krokodil, inventing witty ways to bash Ronald Reagan.
Tervo feels that Kekkonen had the soul of a spy. He notes that when he was in his 20s, Kekkonen started to work as the head of the Kajaani office of the Detective Central Police (EK).
Tervo believes that from 1944 to his death, Kekkonen had dealings with the Soviet KGB "probably on a weekly basis".
"If someone had revealed something like that in the 1970s about any Western head of state, it would have been a scandal stinking up to high heaven!"
Tervo finds it an amusing notion that Kekkonen would have been a "democrat". "Everything possible was kept a secret, all the time. It is not yet clear to what extent Kekkonen was creating the very crises that he was heroically resolving."
Tervo professes a great interest in espionage. He sees the spy as an artist who creates a whole, and who always knows more about what will happen than his characters.
"A spy creates a work of art: he is greatly amused by his ability to make others run around. It is artistic by nature, although often quite bloody and destructive."
Tervo says that surprisingly, espionage is still something like it has always been imagined to be. It is childish. It is still done in a manner similar to boys’ adventure books. It is hard for us normal people to believe that there are such things as triple agents, but there are. If Kim Philby would have had the possibility to double-cross the KGB in Moscow, he would have done it, even after a lifetime of betraying Britain.
Tervo sees espionage as betrayal, as it has been for the past 5,000 years.
As he wrote Myyrä, Tervo says that he came to understand why people write, and why they drink alcohol: it makes time go faster. Writing this novel was a special pleasure - so much so that he completely misjudged how extensive it would be.
Tervo’s witticisms and self-admiring manner on Uutisvuoto, the Finnish version of Have I Got News for You?, irritate some viewers. He says that sometimes his books are not given a chance because the writer has been seen on television.
Not surprisingly, this is quite infuriating, or as Tervo puts it: "It is not necessarily a sign of a profound character not to be seen on television." He adds: "You can get a reputation of being a truly profound person by saying that you don’t watch television. A hundred years ago you were an important person if you said that you never went to vaudeville shows. What a truly great man!"
Tervo notes that an author’s profession is a free profession. He points out that the most revolutionary texts of the last century were written by Franz Kafka, a colourless employee of an insurance company.
Tervo, the free author, wakes up at seven, drinks his coffee, takes his son Kalle to day care, reads his Helsingin Sanomat, and starts to write. On a good day he produces five pages. He saves them on a disc, and depending on his degree of paranoia, on two discs, which he keeps in his home in different locations. In the evening he plays with Kalle.
"They are very good days."
The impatient journalist of a late-edition tabloid finally became a successful author of long works of prose. Tervo sees prose writing as real work. "Writing poems is not, and every poet knows it."
Tervo says that he has a pretty good idea of what he will do in the next five years - when he will again delve into "great national topics". He says that on the basis of literary history he knows that authors can sometimes drift into periods of inactivity, which never lead to anything good. This is why planning is necessary.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude was not born as a sudden outpouring. It is as if Marquez had planned that after 30 pages, I will return to this subject. That is how it goes."
Tervo has been a free writer for ten years. However, detaching himself from Ilta Sanomat took several years. He says that five years after leaving the newspaper, he would sometimes still answer his home telephone with "Iltasanomattervo".
"When you’re working with people you can get some rather sarcastic feedback on a daily basis. At home this is more difficult. For that reason writers are not the best possible conversationalists when they mix with people. They can easily spend an entire evening talking about their own affairs."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.8.2004
MAIJA ALFTAN / Helsingin Sanomat
maija.alftan@hs.fi
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| 31.8.2004 - THIS WEEK |
 Jari Tervo tackles Kekkonen era in new novel |
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